Gods make their own importance.
Epic is a sonnet about a row over a scrap of stony ground in Kavanagh’s native County Monaghan. Two neighbouring families are ready to come to blows over who owns it.
The row happens in 1938, the year of the Munich crisis, when Europe was sliding towards war. Kavanagh asks himself which really mattered more, the feud at home or the fate of nations. For a while he doubts that his own few townlands could ever be the stuff of great poetry. Then the ghost of Homer puts him right, reminding him that the Iliad itself grew out of a quarrel just as small.
It is a short poem with a big idea. Kavanagh claims the right to write about his own parish and to take it as seriously as any epic. Irish poets who came after him, Seamus Heaney among them, took that as permission to write about their own places. The poem was collected in Come Dance with Kitty Stobling (Longmans, 1960).
Read the full poem: it is published in Patrick Kavanagh’s Collected Poems, edited by Antoinette Quinn (Penguin Modern Classics).
This is my first addition to my list of top 100 Irish poems I will be publishing one poem every week to my weekly dose of Irish. Subscribe here to get notified on the next one.
Patrick Kavanagh (21 October 1904 to 30 November 1967) was an Irish poet and novelist.
His best-known works include the novel Tarry Flynn, and the poems “On Raglan Road” and “The Great Hunger”.
He is known for his accounts of Irish life through reference to the everyday and commonplace. He also played as a goalkeeper for his local Gaelic football club. Source Wikipedia
Etienne
Sunday 27th of February 2022
Très beau